Double plus ungood
ugh
The Federal Reserve announced a $1.2 trillion plan three months ago designed to push down mortgage rates and breathe life into the housing market.
But this and other big government spending programs are turning out to have the opposite effect. Rates for mortgages and U.S. Treasury debt are now marching higher as nervous bond investors fret about a resurgence of inflation. — AP
When politics determines interest rates and commodity pricing bad things happen. But hey, this administration rarely demonstrates much sense.
Eager to show action on the ailing economy, President Barack Obama promised Monday to speed federal money into hundreds of public works projects this summer, vowing that 600,000 jobs will be created or saved. — Breitbart
Created! Or saved… whatever. When you’re talking trillions in debt, who cares about little details like that? Mortgage rates can be lowered and increased! Jobs can be created and saved!
The government reported last week that the number of unemployed continues to rise; the unemployment rate now sits at 9.4 percent, the highest in more than 25 years. Hundreds of thousands of Americans continue to lose jobs each month, although fewer jobs were lost last month than expected. — Breitbart
So the White House says that although things look bad, really bad, they’re improving because the loss wasn’t as bad as we thought it was going to be, right? Not so much:
“The economy clearly has gotten substantially worse from the initial predictions that were being made, not just by the White House, but by all of the private sector,” said Austan Goolsbee. — VOA
See, what will happen is we’ll increase our debt to increase our assets and we’ll pay the debt with increased taxes that our increased debt will help pay. We’ll print more money to offset some of the debt that we can’t finance by increasing taxes in the short term. By printing more money we’ll help increase interest rates which will speed recovery by raising interest rates which will slow the recovery by making it more difficult for us to spend the money we’re borrowing. So we’ll lower interest rates by borrowing more money to spend in the mortgage markets which we’ll pay for by printing more money which will raise the interest rates that we’re trying to lower.
But have no fear! We can also finance the increased debt and inflation by increasing tax revenue by saving jobs. Every job that’s saved means that we haven’t lost any additional tax revenue. And we can use the increased revenue we get from decreasing the rate at which tax revenue declines to offset the amount of taxes we’ll have to raise. Which means that even if we lose 300,000 jobs in a month we can plan to borrow trillions of dollars over the course of ten years to save 600,000 jobs. Besides, losing 300,000 jobs in a month isn’t that bad because when we lose more jobs than we expected, that just means that we lost less than we expected.
See?
Oh, and don’t worry about North Korea; we’ve always been at war with Eastasia.
Update: You don’t often get much better double-speak than this:
President Barack Obama sought on Tuesday to show he was serious about improving the U.S. budget picture as he called on Congress to pass new limits on tax cuts and spending programs to avoid adding to deficits. — Reuters
The headline reads, “Obama seeks fiscal responsibility mantle.” It would be funny if it weren’t so terribly sad.
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